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History Now Essay

George Washington and the Constitution

Theodore J. Crackel

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

George Washington was among the first of America’s statesmen to recognize the flaws in the government under the Continental Congress and the Articles of Confederation. His experience in the Revolutionary War had convinced him that...

Appears in:

13 | The Constitution Fall 2007

History Now Essay

The Riddles of "Confederate Emancipation"

Bruce Levine

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In July 1861, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, was exulting over the victory of his troops at the first Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run) and calling it a sign of eventual triumph in the war as a...

Appears in:

26 | New Interpretations of the Civil War Winter 2010

Essay

The American Civil War

Gary W. Gallagher

6, 7, 8, 9

The Civil War marked a defining moment in United States history. Long simmering sectional tensions reached a critical stage in 1860–1861 when eleven slaveholding states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Political...

Essay

The Development of the West

Ned Blackhawk

In the summer of 1876, two dramatically different places captured the American nation’s attention. As the summer began, fairgoers in Philadelphia teemed into the Centennial Exhibition held to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary...

History Now Essay

A Place in History: Historical Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

James Oliver Horton

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In the late fall of 1983, the US Congress passed a bill declaring the third Monday of January each year as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on November 2, 1983, fifteen years after King’s...

Appears in:

4 | American National Holidays Summer 2005

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Lincoln’s Religion

Richard Carwardine

Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"Lincoln often, if not wholly, was an atheist," insisted one of Lincoln’s political associates, James H. Matheny. The young Lincoln had "called Christ a bastard," "ridiculed the Bible," and duped pious voters into believing he was "a...

Appears in:

18 | Abraham Lincoln in His Time and Ours Winter 2008

History Now Essay

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence

Hollis Robbins

Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time." Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

History Now Essay

Before Jackie: How Strikeout King Satchel Paige Struck Down Jim Crow

Larry Tye

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Satchel Paige was pitching in the Negro Leagues in California when he got the news he had been anticipating for two decades. Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey had just signed a Negro to a big-league contract—the first Negro in...

Appears in:

23 | Turning Points in American Sports Spring 2010

History Now Essay

The Form and Function of the Supreme Court

Charles Anthony Smith

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Supreme Court often stands at the center of the storm of politics. High profile cases over individual liberties, federal or state power, or even presidential elections can dominate the news and attention of the public. The close...

Appears in:

15 | The Supreme Court Spring 2008

Essay

The Seventies

Judith Stein

Long overshadowed by the tumultuous 1960s and the transformative 1980s, the 1970s has finally been recognized as an era in its own right. And it is more than Watergate, big hair, and disco. During the 1970s, postwar affluence was...

History Now Essay

“Rachel Weeping for Her Children”: Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery

Margaret Washington

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

During the period leading up to the Civil War, black women all over the North comprised a stalwart but now largely forgotten abolitionist army. In myriad ways, these race-conscious women worked to bring immediate emancipation to the...

Appears in:

5 | Abolition Fall 2005

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

Essay

The Rise of Industrial America, 1877-1900

Richard White

Economics, Government and Civics

When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age , they gave the late nineteenth century its popular name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner...

History Now Essay

Truman and His Doctrine: Revolutionary, Unprecedented, and Bipartisan

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In February 1947, the British government privately told the United States that it would no longer be able to guarantee the security and independence of Greece and Turkey. President Harry S. Truman had known this time would come and...

Appears in:

27 | The Cold War Spring 2011

History Now Essay

From Citizen to Enemy: The Tragedy of Japanese Internment

Julie Des Jardins

Government and Civics, World History

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Although World War II is covered in most school curricula, the story of American citizens who were stripped of their civil liberties here, on American soil, during that war is often omitted. Yet what happened to first-generation...

Appears in:

14 | World War II Winter 2007

History Now Essay

The Presidential Election of 1800: A Story of Crisis, Controversy, and Change

Joanne B. Freeman

Government and Civics

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Nasty political mud-slinging. Campaign attacks and counterattacks. Personal insults. Outrageous newspaper invective. Dire predictions of warfare and national collapse. Innovative new forms of politicking capitalizing on a growing...

Appears in:

1 | Elections Fall 2004

History Now Essay

A Local and National Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Postwar Washington, DC

Wendell E. Pritchett

Government and Civics

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The history of the Civil Rights Movement is the story of numerous grassroots campaigns loosely coordinated and assisted by a small number of national organizations. Every local struggle had its own actors, issues, and nuances, and all...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Lincoln’s Civil Religion

George C. Rable

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

His long-time law partner William Herndon once described Abraham Lincoln as "the most shut-mouthed man who ever lived." That phrase wonderfully captured an important characteristic of a politician who had surprisingly few friends and...

Appears in:

Lincoln

Essay

The Civil War and Reconstruction in the American West

Elliott West

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The histories of the Civil War and of the emerging West were tangled together from their beginnings. Although the war was fought mostly in the East, the events that set it off were born of the expansion of the 1840s, and in turn the...

History Now Essay

Are Artists “Workers”? Art and the New Deal

Elizabeth Broun

Art

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

As I write this essay in February 2009, the nation is engaged in a great discussion about how to restore confidence during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. One contentious issue is whether and how cultural...

Appears in:

The Great Depression

History Now Essay

Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Progressive Reformer

Kathleen Dalton

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Theodore Roosevelt’s interesting life often tempts biographers to write about him with the history left out. His story offers plenty of drama. Born in 1858 to a wealthy family in New York City he waged a life and death struggle...

Appears in:

17 | Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era Fall 2008

Essay

Slavery and Anti-Slavery

David Brion Davis

Abolitionism emerged in America as part of a massive fusion of reform movements related to religious revivals and dedicated to the goal of creating a righteous society capable of fulfilling America’s high ideals. [1] In part, the...

History Now Essay

Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Martha A. Sandweiss

Art, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

During the mid-nineteenth century, American commentators pronounced that new technological innovations in transportation and communications represented nothing less than the "annihilation of space and time." On steamships and...

Appears in:

10 | Nineteenth Century Technology Winter 2006

History Now Essay

The Emancipation Proclamation: Bill of Lading or Ticket to Freedom?

Allen C. Guelzo

Economics, Government and Civics

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Of all the speeches, letters, and state papers he had written, Abraham Lincoln believed that the greatest of them was his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. With one document of only 713 words, Lincoln declared more than...

Appears in:

6 | Lincoln Winter 2005

History Now Essay

Iran and the United States in the Cold War

Malcolm Byrne

Religion and Philosophy, World History

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

As the latest wave of revolutionary uncertainty sweeps across the Middle East, Iran remains one of the region’s biggest question marks. The Islamic regime that temporarily crushed the Green Movement after Iran’s controversial...

Appears in:

27 | The Cold War Spring 2011

History Now Essay

FDR’s Court-Packing Plan: A Study in Irony

Richard G. Menaker

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Great Depression of the 1930s was the nation’s grimmest economic crisis since the founding of the American republic. After the 1932 elections, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a series of innovative remedies—his New Deal—but the...

Appears in:

15 | The Supreme Court Spring 2008

Essay

The Americas to 1620

Christopher L. Miller

Geography, World History

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

At the end of the first millennium, most people in the Eastern Hemisphere had a firm sense of how the world was arranged, who occupied it, and how they had come to be where they were. Various sacred texts as well as long-standing folk...

Essay

National Expansion and Reform, 1815–1860

Joyce Appleby

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics

5, 6, 7, 8

A good way to understand the men and women who created America’s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them...

History Now Essay

The Myth of the Frontier: Progress or Lost Freedom

John Mack Faragher

Art, Economics, Geography, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

For two centuries the frontier West was the setting for America’s most enduring form of popular entertainment. Daniel Boone—master hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, and a frontier leader of the American Revolution—was the progenitor...

Appears in:

9 | The American West Fall 2006

History Now Essay

The League of the Iroquois

Matthew Dennis

Government and Civics

No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since,...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011

History Now Essay

"The Politics of the Future Are Social Politics": Progressivism in International Perspective

Thomas Bender

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The American Progressive movement was not simply a response to the domestic conditions produced by industrialization and urbanization. Instead, it was part of a global response to these developments during an era of unregulated...

Appears in:

17 | Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era Fall 2008

History Now Essay

Lincoln and Whitman

David S. Reynolds

Government and Civics, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The relationship between Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln has long been the stuff of legend. According to one report, in 1857 Lincoln in his Springfield law office picked up a copy of Whitman’s poetry volume Leaves of Grass , began...

Appears in:

Lincoln

History Now Essay

Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters

Carol Berkin

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah Grimke were legends in their own lifetimes. Together these South Carolina sisters made history: daring to speak before "promiscuous" or mixed crowds of men and women, publishing some of the most...

Appears in:

5 | Abolition Fall 2005

History Now Essay

The Columbian Exchange

Alfred W. Crosby

Economics, Geography, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Millions of years ago, continental drift carried the Old World and New Worlds apart, splitting North and South America from Eurasia and Africa. That separation lasted so long that it fostered divergent evolution; for instance, the...

Appears in:

12 | The Age Of Exploration Summer 2007

History Now Essay

The WPA: Antidote to the Great Depression?

Nick Taylor

Art, Economics, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, estimates of the number of jobless workers in the United States ranged from thirteen million to as high as fifteen million—a quarter of the working population. Every...

Appears in:

The Great Depression

Essay

The Early Republic

Joseph J. Ellis

In April of 1789 the ink on the recently ratified Constitution was barely dry when George Washington began the trek from his Mount Vernon plantation to the national capital at New York. The public reverence usually accorded to royalty...

History Now Essay

Patriotism Crosses the Color Line: African Americans in World War II

Clarence Taylor

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Although African Americans have been the victims of racial oppression throughout the history of the United States, they have always supported the nation, especially during wartime. When World War II erupted, over 2.5 million black men...

Appears in:

14 | World War II Winter 2007

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

Essay

The American Revolution, 1763–1783

Pauline Maier

World History

The British colonists of mainland North America had great hopes for the future in 1763, when the Peace of Paris formally ended the Seven Years’ War. Since the late seventeenth century, their lives had been disrupted by a series of...

Essay

The First Age of Reform

Ronald G. Walters

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour." [1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform...

History Now Essay

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess

Joshua Zeitz

Economics, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of many things. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

History Now Essay

The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830

Marylynn Salmon

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

State law rather than federal law governed women’s rights in the early republic. The authority of state law meant that much depended upon where a woman lived and the particular social circumstances in her region of the country. The...

Appears in:

7 | Women's Suffrage Spring 2006

History Now Essay

Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century

Sara Evans

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as...

Appears in:

7 | Women's Suffrage Spring 2006

History Now Essay

Labor Day: From Protest to Picnics

Joshua B. Freeman

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In the 1880s a surge in growth of the American labor movement led to the creation of two workers’ holidays, Labor Day and May Day. May Day soon spread abroad, as European unions and socialist groups adopted it as an occasion to...

Appears in:

4 | American National Holidays Summer 2005

History Now Essay

The Pueblo Revolt

Edward Countryman

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

In 1680 the people known collectively as "Pueblos" rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011

History Now Essay

Andrew Jackson and the Constitution

Matthew Warshauer

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In 1860, biographer James Parton concluded that Andrew Jackson was "a most law-defying, law obeying citizen." Such a statement is obviously contradictory. Yet it accurately captures the essence of the famous, or infamous, Jackson....

Appears in:

22 | Andrew Jackson and His World Winter 2009

History Now Essay

The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War

Matthew Pinsker

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were...

Appears in:

26 | New Interpretations of the Civil War Winter 2010

Essay

African Americans and Emancipation

Manisha Sinha

Historians increasingly understand emancipation was not a singular event that simply involved the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Instead, emancipation is better understood as...

History Now Essay

Nineteenth-Century Feminist Writings

Anne Firor Scott

Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Contemporaries sometimes called the nineteenth century "The Woman’s Century." Certainly it is true that there were dramatic changes in the status and rights of women between the 1790s and 1900, foreshadowing even greater changes in...

Appears in:

7 | Women's Suffrage Spring 2006

History Now Essay

The Catcher in the Rye: The Voice of Alienation

Timothy Aubry

Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

One of the most widely taught novels in the United States, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) opens with the sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s disillusioned departure from what may be the last in a series of schools that...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

Essay

The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective

David Armitage

Government and Civics, World History

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

No American document has had a greater global impact than the Declaration of Independence. It has been fundamental to American history longer than any other text because it was the first to use the name "the United States of America":...

History Now Essay

Edison’s Laboratory

Paul Israel

Economics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Thomas Edison’s death in October 1931 seemed to mark the passing of an era. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Waldemar Kaempffert, the editor of a two-volume Popular History of Invention , expressed the common view that Edison...

Appears in:

10 | Nineteenth Century Technology Winter 2006

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